The Economic Impacts of Child Marriage project is a collaborative effort by the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW) and the World Bank, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, and additional support from the Global Partnership for Education.

The brief summarizes results from an analysis of the impacts of child marriage on women’s work (specifically, labor force participation and type of work held), earnings and productivity and household welfare. It also estimates selected economic costs of these impacts.

This brief summarizes results from an analysis of the impacts of child marriage on a few selected health outcomes, specifically early childbirths, maternal mortality and intimate partner violence. It does not include analyses for other aspects of women’s health that are likely to be affected by child marriage to various extents, such as maternal morbidity, obstetric fistula, female genital mutilation/cutting, sexually-transmitted infections (including HIV and AIDS) and psychological well-being.

This brief summarizes results from an analysis on the impacts of child marriage on women’s decision-making ability within the household, land ownership, knowledge of HIV/AIDS, and birth registrations. While these topics are all related to agency, it should be emphasized that they do not together provide a comprehensive measure of agency, which is beyond the scope of this study.

In this brief, we summarize results from an analysis of the impacts of child marriage on educational attainment for girls and their children and document the extent to which keeping girls in school could help end child marriage.

This brief summarizes results from an analysis of the impacts of child marriage on two health outcomes - under-five mortality and stunting - for young children. For the purposes of this brief, we focus on the impact of child marriage through early childbirths, as this is the mechanism through which child health and nutrition outcomes are most directly affected. There is a close correlation between child marriage and early childbirths in most countries - at a global level, six out of seven early childbirths take place within the context of child marriage. The brief does not include analyses for other aspects of child health that may also be affected by child marriage, nor does it consider costs that may be incurred by health systems as a result of poor child health.

The Indigenous World 2017 provides an update of the current situation for indigenous peoples worldwide and a comprehensive overview of the main global trends and developments affecting indigenous peoples during 2016.

The Indigenous World 2017 comes in a special edition marking the ten years anniversary of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The public launch took place April 25 2017 during the 16th session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York.

Symbolically, it was launched on the same day, as the UN General Assembly marked the ten years anniversary of the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

This guide, as the name suggests, is meant for use by advocates for sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) at the country level. The guide uses the recommendations made to national governments in the publication “Ensuring human rights in the provision of contraceptive information and services: Guidance and recommendations” published by the World Health Organization in 2014, with the aim of ensuring that “the different human rights dimensions are systematically and clearly integrated into the provision of contraceptive information and services”.

The guide takes into account recommendations made by the WHO Guidance document, elaborates on what the recommendations actually mean, and provides a checklist with series of questions that probe into the extent of which a government has implemented or complied with a specific (set of) WHO recommendation (s). There are 17 such checklists, which together constitute a ‘tool box’ for assessing whether human rights are ensured in the provision of contraceptive information and services. The guide also provides an illustrative list of indicators for tracking adherence to human rights norms by contraceptive programmes.

The guide can be used by SRHR advocates, this includes women’s organisations, civil society organisations working on women, young people’s health and SRHR. The tool can also be used by health professionals within the health systems at the national level, as a resource and assessment tool for provision of rights based contraceptive information and services.

This advocate’s guide is meant as a generic tool. It will have to be adapted to different national and even sub-national settings, depending on its history of population control and the ethos of adherence to human rights, health system characteristics and resource levels.We hope this guide will enable SRHR advocates to use these WHO recommendations as a basis for holding governments accountable to respecting and upholding human rights in policies and strategies related to contraceptive information and services, and in the actual organisation and delivery of contraceptive services to users.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) has begun an historic standard-setting process on “Violence and harassment against women and men in the world of work”, the first discussion of which will take place at its International Labour Conference in June 2018. This discussion of a possible new Convention and Recommendation on violence and harassment takes place at a time when a range of researchers, decision makers and activists are increasingly understanding the importance of the world of work as a context to develop and implement strategies to prevent and to respond to violence and harassment against women, regardless of whether this occurs at work or elsewhere.

This study aimed to explore selected risk factors for spousal physical violence (SPV) in women frequenting primary health care clinics (PHCs) in Saudi Arabia. A cross-sectional study design was conducted in six PHCs, where one-on- one, private interviews with 200 women were conducted using a standardized World Health Organization (WHO) violence against women questionnaire (v.10.0). SPV was reported by 45.5% of women. Husband-specific risk factors including alcohol or drug addiction, unemployment, control of wealth in the family, and physical aggression toward other men were significant predictors for SPV. A multisectoral approach should be implemented with focus on providers’ training, women’s safety, and involvement of men in violence prevention and intervention programs.

In the development of any of its global guidelines, the World Health Organization (WHO) places importance on the values and preferences of the population or individuals that could be affected by the recommendations made within the guidelines. WHO has guidelines on the care, treatment and support for women living with HIV and their children in resource-con-strained settings, but these guidelines were published in 2006 and require updating. As an initial step in the updating process, WHO commissioned a global survey to listen to the voices of women living with HIV and determine these women’s sexual and reproductive health priorities. The main aim of the survey was to ensure that the values and preferences of women living with HIV would inform the guidelines from the very start of its development. The methods and key outcomes of the global survey are described and discussed below.

This chapter aims at analyzing the expectations of Tunisian women with the outbreak of the so-called “Arab Spring” and the unexpected events that came not only to counter them but even worse: to bring them back to a status of the Middle Ages. As a result, women’s struggle had to face two things: resist threats to the gains they had made since 1956 with the advent of the Code of Personal Status (CPS) and continue their march towards full equality with men. A beautiful name was given to the revolution that was ignited by the self-immolation of a young fruit and vegetable peddler on 17 December, 2010 in Sidi Bouzid, a small town south of Tunis: the Arab Spring. Why “Spring” when the time was plain winter? Others called it “The Jasmine Revolution,” because Tunisia is a country where Jasmine is the favorite flower of people? What do flowers have to do with revolution? Both names have positive connotations of joy and festivities. This revolution had had no leader and no political party had backed it. It had been a spontaneous movement of youth and women in particular with high expectations for a new democratic Tunisia.

Women Human Rights Defenders (WHRDs) are integral to the promotion of human rights in their communities and in fostering regional stability. However, WHRDs often face violent repercussions for their work—including physical attacks, death threats and assassinations. The danger faced by WHRDs is particularly acute in Mesoamerica, where there were 1,375 reported attacks against WHRDs in Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala between 2012 and 2013. When assessing how to protect WHRDs, it is important to understand their unique vulnerabilities, which stem from their gender and the subject of their advocacy efforts.

Despite a strong normative international legal framework, available regional protection mechanisms through the Organization of American States(OAS)and the nascent development of national laws, Mesoamerican WHRDs work under perilous conditions while their persecutors operate with impunity. While it is the primary responsibility of States to protect WHRDs,the United States has a legal and moral duty to assist this vulnerable population when their own governments are perpetrators of the abuse or fail to provide protection from attacks. This duty arises from UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and its progeny, which embody principles of binding customary international law, as well as the U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security, which represents the government’s express commitment to empower women around the world as agents of peace and stability.

New Zealand has become increasingly multicultural and continues to accept a large number of migrants every year. This adds a duty on its legal system to ensure that its current laws can protect minority groups and adequately deal with culturally specific issues that arise due to different cultural norms. Many argue that the current legal system fails to provide adequate protection for girls and women from an Asian, African and Middle Eastern (AAM) origin; this is due to a lack of multicultural consideration and the addressing of specific issues linked to these ethnic groups. One such issue is the problem of forced marriages among AAM communities

living in New Zealand. This article argues that New Zealand’s laws and processes do not

adequately protect women of an AAM background due to a lack of specific laws and policies that can protect against culturally specific abuse. This argument is reached through the consideration of approaches and procedures through socio-legal methodology. This includes the review of governmental documents, semi-structured interviews with relevant organisations and experienced individuals in the field, case studies and independent research. I will conclude that there is a lack of cultural understanding within support organizations and public institutions regarding the forced marriage issues. Moreover AAM women are also not completely aware of their rights and the available support. Finally, I will provide some recommendations based on knowledge I have gained while conducting my research.

*The full article is available through this link. This article may be available free of charge to those with university credentials.

Exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) has negative consequences for children's well-being and behavior. Much of the research on parenting in the context of IPV has focused on whether and how IPV victimization may negatively shape maternal parenting, and how parenting may in turn negatively influence child behavior, resulting in a deficit model of mothering in the context of IPV. However, extant research has yet to untangle the interrelationships among the constructs and test whether the negative effects of IPV on child behavior are indeed attributable to IPV affecting mothers' parenting. The current study employed path analysis to examine the relationships among IPV, mothers' parenting practices, and their children's externalizing behaviors over three waves of data collection among a sample of 160 women with physically abusive partners. Findings indicate that women who reported higher levels of IPV also reported higher levels of behavior problems in their children at the next time point. When parenting practices were examined individually as mediators of the relationship between IPV and child behavior over time, one type of parenting was significant, such that higher IPV led to higher authoritative parenting and lower child behavior problems [corrected]. On the other hand, there was no evidence that higher levels of IPV contributed to more child behavior problems due to maternal parenting. Instead, IPV had a significant cumulative indirect effect on child behavior via the stability of both IPV and behavior over time. Implications for promoting women's and children's well-being in the context of IPV are discussed.

This practical guide to the conditions of admissibility of individual applications is to be seen in the same context. It is designed to present a clearer and more detailed picture of the conditions of admissibility with a view, firstly, to reducing as far as possible the number of applications which have no prospect of resulting in a ruling on the merits and, secondly, to ensuring that those applications which warrant examination on the merits pass the admissibility test. At present, in most cases which pass that test, the admissibility and merits are examined at the same time, which simplifies and speeds up the procedure.

This document is aimed principally at legal practitioners and in particular at lawyers who may be called upon to represent applicants before the Court. All the admissibility criteria set forth in Articles 34 (individual applications) and 35 (admissibility criteria) of the Convention have been examined in the light of the Court’s case- law. Naturally, some concepts, such as the six-month time-limit and, to a lesser extent, the exhaustion of domestic remedies, are more easily defined than others such as the concept of “manifestly ill-founded”, which can be broken down almost ad infinitum, or the Court’s jurisdiction ratione materiae or ratione personae. Furthermore, some Articles are relied on much more frequently than others by applicants, and some States have not ratified all the additional Protocols to the Convention, while others have issued reservations with regard to the scope of certain provisions. The rare instances of inter-State applications have not been taken into account as they call for a very different kind of approach. This guide does not therefore claim to be exhaustive and will concentrate on the most commonly occurring scenarios.

Decades of advocacy efforts led by the women’s movement and grassroots organizations across all regions have led to the recognition that violence against women and girls is a manifestation of systematic gender discrimination and inequality, a violation of human rights and detrimental to development. The historical developments below highlight the building momentum and increasing attention to violence against women on international and regional agendas.

*The full article is available through this link. This article may be available free of charge to those with university credentials.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) has detrimental consequences for women's mental health. To effectively intervene, it is essential to understand the process through which IPV influences women's mental health. The current study used data from 5 waves of the Women's Employment Study, a prospective study of single mothers receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), to empirically investigate the extent to which job stability mediates the relationship between IPV and adverse mental health outcomes. The findings indicate that IPV significantly negatively affects women's job stability and mental health. Further, job stability is at least partly responsible for the damaging mental health consequences of abuse, and the effects can last up to 3 years after the IPV ends. This study demonstrates the need for interventions that effectively address barriers to employment as a means of enhancing the mental health of low-income women with abusive partners.